What to Read in 2001

I compiled this menu from four, or three, lists of the 20th century's best books.

1. Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, My Love
2. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
3. Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson
4. Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
5. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
6. Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale
7. Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
8. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
9. Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
10. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
11. Ana Castillo, So Far From God
12. John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicles
13. Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
14. Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elders and Betters
15. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
16. Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
17. Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
18. J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man
19. Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet
20. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
21. Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen
22. Louise Erdrich, Tracks
23. James T. Farrell, The Studs Lonigan Trilogy
24. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
25. E.M. Forster, A Passage To India
26. Janet Frame, Owls Do Cry
27. Marilyn French, The Women's Room
28. Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem
29. Nadine Gordimer, July's People
30. Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life
31. Henry Green, Loving
32. Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
33. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
34. Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather
35. Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land or The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
36. Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
37. Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
38. Janet Hobhouse, The Furies
39. Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey
40. Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
41. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point
42. Henry James, Portrait of a Lady or The Ambassadors or The Bostonians or The Golden Bowl or The Wings of the Dove
43. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
44. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
45. Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List
46. Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion
47. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
48. Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
49. Rudyard Kipling, Kim
50. Joy Kogawa, Obasan
51. Margaret Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers
52. D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
53. Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
54. Jack London, The Call of the Wild
55. Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
56. Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
57. James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
58. Ford Maddox Ford, Parade's End or The Good Soldier
59. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
60. Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
61. Olivia Manning, The Balkan Trilogy
62. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
63. Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
64. Isabel Miller, Patience and Sarah
65. Lorrie Moore, Anagrams
66. Toni Morrison, Jazz
67. Bharati Mukherjee, Wife
68. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
69. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
70. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
71. V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
72. V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
73. Edna O'Brien, House of Splendid Isolation
74. Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
75. Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
76. Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
77. John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra
78. Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This
79. Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
80. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
81. Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets
82. Katharine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
83. Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur
84. E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
85. Mary Renault, The King Must Die
86. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
87. Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
88. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
89. Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses
90. May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
91. Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
92. Anita Shreve, The Weight of Water
93. Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead Leslie
94. Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here
95. Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
96. Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover
97. Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
98. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
99. Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
100. William Styron, Sophie's Choice
101. Elizabeth Taylor, Angel
102. Anne Tyler, If Morning Ever Comes
103. John Updike, Rabbit, Run
104. Jane Urquhart, Away
105. Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
106. Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
107. Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
108. Eudora Welty, Stories
109. Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
110. Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier
111. Antonia White, Frost in May
112. Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
113. Jeannette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
114. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
115. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
116. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

As of 26 November:

1. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
2. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
3. Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road
4. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
5. James Dickey, Deliverance
6. E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime
7. Margaret Drabble, The Radiant Way
8. William Faulkner, Light in August
9. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Beautiful and the Damned or Tender Is the Night or This Side of Paradise
10. Penelope Fitzgerald, At Freddie's
11. John Fowles, The Magus
12. Keri Hulme, The Bone People
13. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
14. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
15. William Kennedy, Ironweed
16. Jack Kerouac, On the Road
17. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
18. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
19. Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith or Babbitt or Main Street
20. Mary McCarthy, The Group
21. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
22. Carson McCullers, Member of the Wedding
23. Carson McCullers, "Ballad of the Sad Café"
24. Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
25. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
26. Nevil Shute, On the Beach
27. Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief
28. Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
29. Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons
30. Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
31. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
32. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

From this list but not required this year:

• Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy and the Salterton Trilogy
• John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (trilogy)
• James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (not really eventually)
• James Joyce, Ulysses
• Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
• Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
• Thomas Pynchon, V.

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Last modified 26 November 2001

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